Citizen groups in cities along the Texas and Louisiana coasts have long been fighting a proposed buildout in fossil fuel infrastructure.
On Tuesday, federal energy officials visited Port Arthur, Texas, one of two communities along the Gulf Coast where the federal government has approved new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. (The other is Lake Charles, La.)
During the visit, officials touted the Biden administration's efforts to promote clean energy while underscoring the importance of newly approved gas terminals.
"Port Arthur has powered our nation for 125 years," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told residents of the petrochemical hub at a Tuesday listening session. "And we want [it] to power our nation for the next 125 years — and to show how you can lead in clean energy as well."
With limited time remaining in President Biden's first term, Granholm stressed the "huge sense of urgency" to bring communities like Port Arthur "a vision of employment local employments and clean, clean air."
The secretary painted a bright picture of the future of the region's manufacturing, describing Port Arthur as a future hub for offshore wind. She also touted the region's potential to become a hub for next-generation fossil fuel-based tech, like carbon capture and hydrogen.
"You've obviously got huge solar resources for community solar or distributed solar or utility scale solar," Granholm added. "You've got land, you have sun, you can attract manufacturing."
Federal officials pitched such a transformation as a significant boon for the Texas city, which has seen its population shrink in the past two decades alongside a rise in petrochemical production.
The federal government is also promoting a push toward local training and apprenticeships, which would spread the benefits of any new industrial push into the majority Black and Hispanic community, one union leader said at the listening session.
"A producer doesn't have to look like me anymore. It looks like the community," said Joe Cooper, an Austin-based training director for the Plumbers and Pipefitters union who is white.
Cooper argued that making the building and energy workforces more diverse would have widespread benefits for Texas: every such apprenticeship could bring "two generations into the middle class."
But some residents of Gulf Coast communities felt that the listening tour rang hollow because it came only after a spate of LNG projects had already been approved.
"It feels like a dog-and-pony show for them to check off the boxes: they met with an environmental justice community," Roishetta Ozane, a Louisiana-based campaigner with the Texas Campaign for the Environment, told The Hill.
At the core of the meeting, according to Ozane, was an unspoken message: "'We've approved these projects in your community, here is your consolation prize.'"
Ozane recalled a prior event last year, when federal officials met with Port Arthur residents about the then-proposed Commonwealth LNG terminals.
"They heard all these stories about how we're unprotected; about my children with asthma and eczema," Ozane said.
"They went right back to D.C. and approved Commonwealth."
With federal support for the LNG expansion, Ozane now believes that the real environmental fight is elsewhere: in the boardrooms of the banks currently deliberating over whether to fund it.
Last week, representatives of 140 Gulf Coast civil society groups called on global banks to stop insuring gas plants and LNG terminals.
Ozane said her and other advocates' message to banks is clear.
"Where is your money really going? What is worth more to you?" she said.
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